How Google is Undermining Progressive Media

By now we’re all familiar with the term “fake news.” What started as a colloquialism to describe made-up news stories that proliferated on social media to skew the election in Donald Trump’s favor has since been flipped by Trump to dismiss any factual news reporting that criticizes him. Much as Trump has blurred the public’s understanding of what “fake news” is for his own benefit, it seems like Google may also be stretching fake news’ definition to undermine progressive media outlets working to hold the Trump administration accountable.

Any website looking to share content, real or fake, relies heavily on now-omnipresent tech platforms like Google and Facebook to reach their audience. After initially downplaying the Russian influence campaign on their platform, Facebook eventually admitted that roughly 126 million users in the U.S. may have seen content created by Russian-linked accounts. Google discovered about $4,700 worth of search-and-display ads believed to be bought by accounts connected to the Russian government. The company found an additional $53,000 worth of ads bought from Russian internet addresses or with Russian money, though it is unclear if these purchases were tied to the government.

In April, Google responded to public outrage and Senate pressure about misleading and false articles on their platform with Project Owl—an initiative aimed at suppressing fake news and pointing users to “more authoritative content.” While the shift was likely well-intentioned, the tech giant seems to have overcorrected and created consequences that have gone beyond pushing users away from Macedonian content farms publishing provably false stories.

On Nov. 28, AlterNet, a progressive media website, sent an email to readers saying that Google’s algorithm changes reduced their search traffic by 40%. While AlterNet certainly infuses opinion and a liberal point of view in their reporting, their articles are always factual and should not be held to the same standard as websites that publish headlines such as “Hillary Clinton Has Third Heart Attack—Docs Says She ‘Won’t Survive.’”

“The impact of Project Owl has been to invisibly censor independent news, while at the same time boosting the standing of a group of mainstream print and broadcast outlets that have collaborated with these platforms to ‘solve’ the fake news crisis,” AlterNet claimed in their email, and it is not the only website fighting this battle.

The New York Times published an article on Sept. 26 under the headline “As Google Fights Fake News, Voices on the Margins Raise Alarm” that chronicled a drop off in traffic to the World Socialist Website (WSWS) that their editorial chairman attributed to Google’s initiative. WSWS compiled data that shows 13 websites that lost significant Google search traffic post-Project Owl. Notably, Media Matters fell by 42%, Democracy Now fell by 36% and The Intercept fell by 19%.

Independent news outlets—even those with a relatively small following—are essential to a free and open democracy. The Progressiverecently cited a study by Harvard professor Gary King and his former graduate students Ben Schneer and Ariel White that discovered that “if just three outlets write about a particular major national policy topic—such as jobs, the environment or immigration—discussion of that topic across social media rose by as much as 62.7% of a day’s volume, distributed over the week.”

If small, independent news outlets are prevented from reaching their audience because of suppression by giant tech conglomerates, the consequences could be dire.

In their email, AlterNet calls on Google to “rescind the algorithm changes made under Project Owl and instead to consider adopting a more transparent method of determining fake news,” and for “the public, the FTC and Congress to consider regulating Facebook and Google as monopoly platforms for the distribution of content.”

If Google’s mission is truly to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” it may want to begin by not suppressing the progressive voices that challenge an administration that openly opposes a free press.

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Rob Hullum is the web editor for the Shepherd Express, where he covers a breadth of happenings going on in the city for the Around Milwaukee section. He has also written feature pieces on the changing East Side and Milwaukee’s startup scene.

Comments (4)

It is just "business"

And business has a purpose of making money, which means increasing the wealth of those who OWN the business. It is NOT to increase the wealth of its Suppliers, Customers, or even its Workers.

Google is a business, a very BIG business, and it demands making a lot of money, at whatever costs and means are necessary, especially at a cost to everyone except its owners if win-lose makes money faster than running a win-win business. That is why owners choose to run a business, am I correct?

Google does not run a search service as a free public service, it runs it as a way to make money, collecting fees from its advertisers. Suppose "Good Company" is better than "Bad Company", but "Bad" stands to pay Google more advertising dollars. Who is Google going to promote to a higher place in the search results? Surely not the "Good" company that customers really would like to buy from.

In the telephone world, even the yellow pages was not a free and impartial equal listing of all businesses, those businesses had to pay to be there, and could pay more to get a more eye-catching listing, bold, large, red print, graphics, etc.

What I am getting back to... the Internet is not a free service of totally equal information sharing with Google only as a free agent for an equal chance of finding the very best links. The internet is just another way to connect paying customers to the providers that pay the search providers the most to get themselves higher on the list.

The internet is now a tool of business, business owned by the top 1% and run for the benefit of the top 1%. Anything that stands in the way of that will be blocked or at least made more difficult to connect with. That includes protests and blogs that truly favor the bottom 99% flying in the face against the top 1%.

As Google's reduction of links to the "socialist" WSWS pages, the "censorship" of the left wing anti-capitalists has already been in play. It is not true censorship as in a total block, but if they are pushed past search page 3 or 4, who looks beyond that if you do not already know the specific name?

With this Dec. 14th end of the FCC's net neutrality, they can now legally block such free speech, it is over the infrastructure that they own. it will be back to the US Postal Service for access now, as that is the only channel left that is not beholden to private corporate interests. When you are not on true land-line phones anymore, getting your phone service through the internet may even be at risk. So far, they cannot legally block a liberal's access to 911 or to make a phone call, but I can see that chipping away too, like paying per phone call minute again (except for 911).

SE Wisc. Citizen95 days ago

Today, Dec. 14th, is the day.

I have been reading articles in the IT world (yeah, the tech geeky stuff), that the "Cloud" is going to fail, and it is all going to happen because the Cloud can expand its storage and indexing capabilities FASTER than the Broadband internet to it can be grown. Cell Phones use of paid data plans such as 3G and 4G must be increased both in volume and in speed to keep up with streaming 4K video and fast response on online gaming. Your AT&T U-Verse and Spectrum-Time Warner Road-Runner speeds must also increase the same. That costs private money that needs a payer.

Look also at Microsoft Windows (also Google Android and Apple IOS), and see how there is an incredible demand for "connecting all your devices" by these paid wireless data channels. And I mean connection that demands security and identification of who is seeing what. There is no more anonymity and privacy anymore in a world that is built entirely on privately-owned network media equipment. Don't think for a minute that because your cell and wireless signals travel on public airwaves that they are unrestricted, as long as any of the intermediate way-points are owned by private corporate interests (who demand a fee for their usage), they have a right and duty to know what is there and to restrict it.

Us old-school people remember CB-radio. It was direct private user broadcast, no way for a corporation or government to do anything but eaves-drop on the sender, they could not tell who was receiving and listening... or how many were listening.

Now you have your cell-phones, generally only 1 can listen, and the wireless providers know who that listener is, kind of hard to put out a subversive, anti-top1% message without the 1% knowing who is listening today.

Even with classic TV and Radio broadcasts "Over The Air" (OTA) on our FCC Public airwaves, the corporate/government/private sender could not even know if anyone was listening (often with rabbit-ears), so they could not tell who was listening to a particular program and put them on a national security watch-list, a marketing watch-list, or a political opposition watch-list. Even the conversion to "Digital TV" did not change that privacy of reception. But the internet does.

Now, if you are a business and have to send "paid advertising", you want to know how many received your "message", or you will accuse your broadcaster of over-charging for when nobody is even tuned in (or even in the room). Imagine if your Internet-enabled TV could use its webcam to let Fox or NBC know how many faces are in the room when the ad plays, and not gone to the bathroom?

Nowadays 95% or better of people receive their signals through satellite, cable, or "U-verse", so you can see the tremendous pressure to kill off that 5% still getting anonymous OTA, so those public airwaves can be turned over to paid wireless usage. It's coming folks.

This is why I say broadcast is dying, tagged delivery notice is coming. It even includes "script war" in your Browser Apps.

SE Wisc. Citizen95 days ago

more to add

"Script wars" -- You remember "Cookies"? They started as a good thing. When a website has a million users, and they want to remember where you left off for your more convenient personal browsing experience, the web-site operator had a choice. They could save all those pieces of information on their servers, just a waste of space because it was not needed when you were away, or they could save it on your PC, phone, or tablet. The cookie was the most efficient way to have the storage of this data available to the web-site owner at the precise time it was needed, when you were online. There were even rules built into the browser for privacy reasons... Macy's could not look at your Wall Street Journal cookies, the IRS website could not look at your World Socialist Website cookies, Google could not look at your Amazon cookies.

What if the same company owned Macy's, Wall Street Journal, Amazon, Google. Now it is one company and it can look at its own cookies. Hence the desire to merge everything until there is only one company that owns it all. Too slow, they needed something quicker to share the cookies from many companies.

Individual website owners wanted to keep their pages free for anonymous use and used paid advertising. So we had the "Banner Ads". You would see all different companies in those Banners, but what you did not know was that all these many companies were using one company, the name "DoubleClick" comes to mind. DoubleClick would put a unique code in each ad from each webpage they were on, and DoubleClick could read its own cookies... so they had the goods on all the many websites you visited, they were one company and they could read all those cookies and build a personal profile on you. They could know that people who shop Amazon also visited NetFlix (and rarely visited CNN), they could know that people who shopped AutoZone also looked at TireRack (and rarely looked at NPR).

So Microsoft & Chrome let us block Cookies.

We even loaded browser add-ons, some free, some from our paid anti-virus providers to block the web-page scripts that loaded the ads. And the web-site operators reacted by running scripts to check that the ads were NOT being blocked before they would let you see the web-page content you were there for.

The desire for guaranteed ad delivery, to keep them "in your face".

These scripts got nasty, would try to break down your device's defenses, often these attempts were the cause of viruses, trojans, malware, even to allow ransomware to get in. They would even open holes in your security to serve their own ends.

So... how are we going to fix this? How can we make sure the internet remains free, but the people who paid for it get their info on you, the user?

There is more here than simply fast lanes and slow lanes or squeezing out the non-profitable web-page operators or censoring politically rebellious traffic.

But you as Consumers living a free-choice American life, you have to decide if that is worth paying for.

SE Wisc. Citizen95 days ago

Net Neutrality?

Does this point to censorship of the news... specifically opinion by the opposition?

The first amendment has never mentioned regulation that it only print or speak the truth in our free press and free speech. Who was going to prove it when 5 other Bill of Rights were all about our rights to our day in court, summarized as "innocent until proven guilty".

Here is the more important fact... while the creation of the auto-routing, self-healing network protocol known as "Al Gore's Internet" was a defense department project called DARPANET, it was paid for by public funds. It was really to develop a reliable way to communicate to our nuclear missile silos that were scattered all over this country. But the code-protocol signals still had to be carried on a physical communications layer that was largely owned by private corporations... most specifically AT&T also known as "Ma Bell". By not having "military phone lines", it became harder to know where the signals were going, they were mixed in with people's gossipy phone calls.

It is not like a public highway that had the land purchased and roads paid for by Federal, State, and Local tax dollars, so it is only natural that the private owners of those satellite links, fiber optic lines, copper wire phone lines, cable lines would want to control the traffic on their lines.

But here is an ugly thing... we already know you cannot buy a Pepsi in a McDonalds because this private corporation has an exclusive contract with Coca-Cola. But imagine if when you made your telephone voice calls, that being on Century-Tel's lines you could not talk to anyone on an AT&T line. The same could be to limit or block my use of a Verizon network link to access this Shepherd Express web-site.

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